


A New Year, Purgatory, and Cas

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gay Club AU, M/M, New Year's Eve, New Year's Eve Destiel, destiel au, idek what I did here, it turned out kinda, not fab but I like it a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-04 20:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3087947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas and Dean have been friends forever, and they've always spent New Year's Eve together. The one time they don't, Dean ends up in Purgatory, Miami (aka a gay club) and things take a turn for the interesting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Year, Purgatory, and Cas

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for jocstiel's fic exchange over on tumblr (my URL is i-am-superwhomarvellocked, if you'd care to check me out). My prompt was: (Dean and Cas are lifelong friends, ever since they were small enough to still use a booster seat. On New Years Eve, Dean goes to the local gay club for the totally bangin’ New Years Party (props if Gabriel is club manager) and he sees Cas in the crowd. Cas sees him too, they dance together, admit their crushes on each other, and kiss as they watch the ball drop.)  
> Hope I get props and that whoever prompted this likes it! :)

Dean Winchester and Castiel Shirley had been next-door neighbors in a quiet suburban neighborhood for all of their lives. Dean had known Castiel since they'd been out of diapers, and they'd been friends just as long. Dean remembered their first day of kindergarten, when he'd walked to the big brick building with Cas, excited about making new friends and his brand new red backpack, but also nervous. When they saw the flagpole and walked up to the front doors, Dean had stopped in his tracks. Cas had been the one to pull at his sleeve and insist that he "hurry up and come on already, Dean!"  
They'd always spent New Year's Eve together. Since their families were so close, they did the usual combined Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. Mary Winchester made the most amazing pies, and Cas's mom always cooked the roast beef or turkey to a perfect finish. But those holidays were more for the whole family. New Year's Eve was a Cas and Dean thing.  
But for this New Year's Eve, their 21st, their families had decided to take a trip down to Miami to visit Sam, who was going to college there, and "keep warm and let the snow blow over," as Cas's dad Chuck put it, which Dean took to mean that the adults wanted to go to a fashionable nightclub and drink all night while a babysitter took care of the kids. Which apparently also included Dean and Cas, since while John was pulling on his suit jacket, he'd looked at them and reminded them to "help out the babysitter and behave."  
Dean had never been much of one for following orders, so he'd tried to sneak out with Cas, but Cas was just too goddamn responsible to go with Dean, so he tried to stay, but then Cas had said, "Go out and have fun, Dean! Don't let me stop you!" with that eye-crinkling smile he did and Dean couldn't say, "No, the only person I want to spend New Year's Eve with is you," so he'd had to go and basically things had just become a gigantic clusterfuck.  
So that was why Dean was currently wandering around the local gay club called Purgatory, doing his best to drown his sorrows in whiskey while electronic dance music blared over the sound system. As he looked around, he couldn't deny that the New Year's Eve party was pretty spectacular. There were people dancing and grinding on the neon floor, people making out in darkened corners, people doing...other things in darkened corners, a hell of a lot of drinking (which Dean was on board with 100%), and sugary sweets everywhere.  
He sighed and nursed his drink while thinking about past New Year's Eve celebrations.  
When they were kids, it had been all about pizza and blanket forts. He remembered when they were six and he'd said, "Come on, Cas, grab those pillows," and Cas had hauled them over in his little footie pajamas with birds all over them. He'd put the pillows in just the right place and crawled into the fort.  
"Awesome. Now you come check it out." Cas had squeezed in beside him and grinned, gap-toothed. His mom had yelled, "Boys! Pizza!" and Dean had sprinted out to grab the pizza and bring it back to Cas, and they'd stayed up the whole night talking about dinosaurs with mouths stuffed full of pizza.  
Or the time when they'd been in seventh grade and Dean had brought his whole video game collection over to Cas's house and they'd played them while the adults watched the ball drop in the next room.  
"Die, zombie scum," Dean had said, pounding the controller enthusiastically. On screen, Cas had pulled some kind of move that sliced off six zombie heads at once. Dean had paused for a moment in appreciation, and his avatar was nearly slaughtered by the horde.  
"Crap," he'd said, sprinting backwards and blowtorching. Once he and Cas were in relative safety in an abandoned warehouse, Dean had said to Cas, "Man, where did you learn how to do that? It was so cool."  
Cas had smirked and said, "Don't worry, Dean, I'll show you how to do it," and turned his attention back to the game.  
"I can beat anyone at this game, but you always kick my butt," Dean had said in frustration while setting zombies ablaze.  
"No big deal, Dean," Cas had said. "At least I'm the only one." Dean had thrown down the controller and punched him, and their game had devolved into a wrestling match until they eventually got tired and passed out.  
As they got older, they started to go to parties on New Year's Eve, but they always went to the same ones. Dean remembered Cas's messy hair, his warm laugh, games of spin the bottle and truth or dare, pizza and punch and party poppers.  
His brooding was interrupted by a topless guy in golden booty shorts who slid across the bar and twirled a finger through his hair.  
"Not having fun, handsome?" the man purred.  
Dean blushed and the alcohol rushing through his system made him answer truthfully, if slightly slurred. "I would be, but the only guy I want is one who's not here. I'm not really interested right now."  
"Well," the man huffed, standing up, "I think we can change that." He offered his hand to Dean. "They call me Gabriel. I'm the manager of Purgatory, and if I can't help you bang this dream guy, or at least a decent substitute, then nobody can."  
Dean shook Gabriel's hand in a bit of a daze. Gabriel noticed the glasses lined up by Dean's elbow and chuckled. "Had a few already? That should help smooth the way a bit." He clambered up onto the bar and scanned the crowd. "What's your Casanova look like, princess?"  
"He's a couple inches shorter than me, dark-haired, blue eyes, kinda muscular..." Dean realized that he had Cas's body memorized, down to the three freckles on his left hipbone, and ached for him, then did his best to push away the feeling. He was bi (he'd accepted that a while ago), and he knew that he was desperately, utterly in love with Castiel. He had known since junior year, when he and Cas had had a huge fight about Dean and some girl dating because Cas was being all... possessive? Was that the right word? Dean didn't know, but when Cas had growled, "Stop dating her, Dean," at him, he realized that everyone he'd ever been with was a poor replacement for the perfect person in front of him. But he couldn't ruin their friendship -- what they had was important enough to him that he could push down those feelings.  
"I don't actually want...to fuck him." His tongue stumbled over the words.  
Gabriel gave him a skeptical look and shook his head. "The only guy you want here? Kinda sounds like you want to fuck him. "  
"No!" Dean shook his head violently and slammed his hand down onto the fake oak of the bar.  
Gabriel put up his hands in the classic I-surrender position. "Okay, okay. But if you do want someone who looks like him, that one fits the bill." He pointed at a man sitting alone at one of the other two bars who was slamming down shots, his features highlighted briefly by the strobe lights illuminating the club. As Dean's jaw dropped, Gabriel smirked, got off the bar, and sauntered away.  
Dean watched the man, who was either Cas or Cas's long-lost identical twin, put down his shot glass and stare into the crowd. He didn't look sad, exactly, just lonely and disappointed. The Cas doppelgänger turned back to the bar, and he caught sight of Dean.  
What happened next wasn't some sort of slow-motion graceful run towards each other where they met up perfectly. Instead, it was an uncomfortable kind of power-walk where they both headed toward each other as quickly as they could while trying to make it look like they weren't trying to do that.  
"Hey, Cas," Dean said once they finally met up in the middle of the dance floor. "What're you doing here?" He had to almost shout to be heard over the roar of the music and everyone dancing, so he leaned in to Cas. He had absolutely no ulterior motive for doing so as he stared at Cas's lips.  
"I realized something," Cas yelled back.  
"What?" Dean asked, confused.  
Cas blushed hotly and answered, "I didn't want to be with the other kids on New Year's Eve. And you were gone, and I didn't know where you were, so I came...here. I'm sorry. I was going to tell you, but it never seemed like the right moment." He dropped his head uncomfortably.  
Dean rolled his eyes and said, "Man, I don't care if you're gay. You know I'm bisexual."  
Cas looked startled for a moment and then said, "No, it's not that. I..." He turned away and muttered something into the crowd.  
"What?" Dean yelled.  
Cas repeated what he'd said, but whispered it this time.  
Dean, still drunk and not really caring about the consequences of his actions, grabbed Cas's jaw and tugged Cas toward him, then came in so close that he could make out each one of Cas's eyelashes. "What. Did. You. Say?"  
"I said I'm gay for you! Okay?!" Cas screamed, shoving Dean away from him. "And now I've screwed everything up, just like I always do. Now you're going to leave, and I'm going to stay here and spend every New Year's Eve for the rest of my life wishing I'd never said anything!"  
Dean stood where Cas had pushed him for a few seconds, shocked. Then he leaned toward Cas again, stumbled, and almost fell onto him. Maybe the whiskey had been stronger than he thought. Cas held him up, and Dean saw tears pool in his eyes.  
Dean needed to stop that immediately, so he bent down and murmured into Cas's ear, "No, you're not. If I get to choose, you're going to spend every New Year's Eve with me in the back of the Impala, drinking cheap beer and laughing and watching the sun set. You're going to eat pizza and I'm going to wipe the sauce off your mouth while we cuddle, and I don't care that that sounds girly as shit. I'm going to tell you about my favorite parts of the year, and you're going to tell me about your New Year's resolutions. We're going to watch the fireworks out the back window, and when the ball drops I'm going to kiss you and you're going to kiss me back. We're going to spend every New Year's Eve of our lives happy that you said something."  
He pulled away and saw that Cas was smiling a mile wide, and he got exactly no warning before Cas pulled Dean down by his collar and kissed him. For a second, it was everything that Dean had wanted since junior year: needy and sweet and rough and Cas. Then they bumped heads painfully and separated, laughing. Dean realized at that moment that he and Cas were never going to be the typical perfect couple. They weren't going to be like the movies, where a fairytale kiss between the two romantic leads happened exactly as the ball dropped and they matched up exactly and everything went right. Instead, they were going to be more like the comic relief characters, whose kiss was sloppy and awkward and imperfect.  
But he realized that he didn't care. Real life was a lot messier than the movies, but it was real, and that was enough. More than enough. That was Cas.  
They spent a few moments just staring at each other, until the music in the club changed abruptly from thumping bass beats to Elvis's "Can't Help Falling In Love With You." Dean looked up, confused, and saw Gabriel winking at him from the DJ's turntable. He grinned back and offered his hand to Cas.  
"May I have this dance?"  
"What do you think, you idiot?" Cas said as he pressed himself against Dean. They swayed together slowly, and Dean tripped over Cas's feet once, twice, and three times. Finally Cas laughed, rough and low in Dean's ear, and took the lead. They moved a little more gracefully around the dance floor then, and Dean only stumbled when the club exploded with the sound of people counting down along with the TV, which showed the ball in New York City.  
He and Cas stopped dancing and yelled together with everyone in the club, "3! 2! 1! Happy New Ye-" Dean cut Cas off with a soft kiss, and melted against him as Cas kissed back. 

The next day, Dean woke up in Cas's bed, which was thankfully on a different floor than the rest of the bedrooms, back at the house with sunlight streaming through the window. He rolled onto his side to see Cas watching him.  
Dean cleared his throat uncomfortably and said, "Hey, I know you might have been drunk last night, so if you don't want to take this any farther, then I'm okay with that." He swallowed painfully as he waited for Cas to reply.  
Cas said, "Dean, I've been waiting for you for six years. If you think that I'm just going to kiss or screw you, then you are sorely mistaken." He leaned toward Dean, tangling the sheets between them, and laughed against his mouth as he kissed him. "It's far too late for you to back out of this now."  
Dean pulled back just long enough to gasp, "What makes you think I want to?" before diving back into his mouth and early morning sunlight and 300-count thread cotton sheets and the smell of bacon from downstairs and Cas.


End file.
